Encourages Christian teenage girls to explore and discover Truth.

Hume’s moral philosophy is a sentiment-based view. Moral judgment is a matter of the passions; certain traits of character count as virtues or vices because of the approval or disapproval they evoke in us, feelings that express concern we have about the social effects of these traits. A sentiment-based approach is attractive, since morality seems fundamentally to involve caring for other people. Sentiment-based views, however, face a real challenge. It is clear that our affections are often particular; we favor certain (...) persons over others. This poses a problem when it comes to determining the proper content of morality. The ties of sentiment would seem to be in tension with the aspirations of morality toward impartiality and universality. (shrink)

No one would deny that sustainability is necessary for individual, business, and national survival. How this goal is to be accomplished is a matter of great debate. In this article I will show that the United States and other developed countries have a duty to create sustainable cities, even if that is against a notion of private property rights considered as an absolute. Through eminent domain and regulation, developed countries can fulfill their obligations to current and future generations. To do (...) so, the governments must reject perfectly competitive free market capitalism and the absolute right to private property, and more fully adopt social welfare capitalism as their economic system. The result will be a sustainable society that balances democracy, individual rights and individual flourishing with the community’s flourishing. (shrink)

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from _Thought in the Act _Combining philosophy and aesthetics, _Thought in the Act_ is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” (...) a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. _Thought in the Act_ enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is (...) to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward. (shrink)

What's Wrong with Stereotyping? offers a refreshing and accessibly written philosophical take on the ethics of stereotyping. Stereotyping is woven into every aspect of human experience: conversation, psychology, algorithmic systems, and culture. It relates to generalization and induction, core aspects of rationality. But when and why it is morally wrong to stereotype? This book tackles this deep and enduring puzzle. To solve it, philosopher Erin Beeghly delves into the relationship between stereotyping and another phenomenon, discrimination. Not only does stereotyping (...) cause discriminatory treatment, she argues, stereotyping can itself be discriminatory. This insight-that to stereotype is to discriminate-enables a novel philosophical methodology, which builds towards a theory of wrongful stereotyping by analyzing the lived experiences of marginalized groups and existing theories of wrongful discrimination. -/- Core chapters evaluate important ethical wrongs: failure to treat persons as individuals, disrespect, harm, prejudice, threats to freedoms, and failure to treat persons as equals. One finds that there is no "essence" of wrongful stereotyping, a single property or set of properties that all problematic cases share in common. Nor are the wrongs of stereotyping reducible to an elegant number, two or three. Instead, wrongful stereotyping is a messy normative kind characterized by clusters of wrong-making properties, including all the ones noted here (and perhaps more). Readers will come away with a radically pluralistic, open-ended theory of wrongful stereotyping that they can use to identify wrongful stereotyping in their own lives and our contemporary world. Filled with thought-provoking examples and models for social change, this book emphasizes the messiness of moral reality and the importance of looking to the past in order to understand the ethical perils of stereotyping. (shrink)

Much has been made of the importance of training ethical, socially conscious engineers, but does US engineering education actually encourage neophytes to take seriously their professional responsibility to public welfare? Counter to such ideals of engagement, I argue that students’ interest in public welfare concerns may actually decline over the course of their engineering education. Using unique longitudinal survey data of students at four colleges, this article examines (a) how students’ public welfare beliefs change during their engineering education, (b) whether (...) engineering programs emphasize engagement, and (c) whether these program emphases are related to students’ public welfare beliefs. I track four specific public welfare considerations: the importance to students of professional/ethical responsibilities, understanding the consequences of technology, understanding how people use machines, and social consciousness. Suggesting a culture of disengagement, I find that the cultural emphases of students’ engineering programs are directly related to their public welfare commitments and students’ public welfare concerns decline significantly over the course of their engineering education. However, these findings also suggest that if engineering programs can dismantle the ideological pillars of disengagement in their local climates, they may foster more engaged engineers. (shrink)

If someone says, “Asians are good at math” or “women are empathetic,” I might interject, “you're stereotyping” in order to convey my disapproval of their utterance. But why is stereotyping wrong? Before we can answer this question, we must better understand what stereotypes are and what stereotyping is. In this essay, I develop what I call the descriptive view of stereotypes and stereotyping. This view is assumed in much of the psychological and philosophical literature on implicit bias and stereotyping, yet (...) it has not been sufficiently defended. The main objection to the descriptive view is that it fails to include the common-sense idea that stereotyping is always objectionable. I argue that this is actually a benefit of the view. In the essay's final part, I put forward two hypotheses that would validate the claim that stereotyping is always morally or epistemically wrong. If these hypotheses are false—which is very likely—we have little reason to build moral or epistemic defect into the very idea of a stereotype. Moreover, we must abandon the seemingly attractive claim that judging individuals based on group membership is intrinsically wrong. (shrink)

The article investigates the contentious relationship between economics and social studies and considers the extent to which the dominant narratives and methodological approaches in economics are c...

This collection brings together a diverse range of interpretivist perspectives to find fresh takes on the meanings of religion. Cutting across paradigms and traditions, experts from the UK, US, and India apply different approaches to engagement with beliefs and themes, including identity, ritual, and emotion.

The United States’ long-running “War on Drugs” has been a dramatic failure. By adopting a punitive mindset centered on prohibition, government officials have demonstrated that control—not public he...

Drawing from 85 semi-structured interviews with fathers and mothers in three cities, I argue that when fathers in heterosexual couples experience the transition to parenthood in ways that are structurally comparable to mothers, they come to think about and enact parenting in ways that are more similar to mothers. I consider the specific role played by extended time off immediately after the birth of a child in structuring that experience. By drawing fathers into the daily realities of child care, free (...) of workplace constraints, extended time off provides the space necessary for fathers to develop the parenting skills and sense of responsibility that then allows them to be active co-parents rather than helpers to their female partners. This shift from a manager-helper dynamic to that of coparenting creates the opportunity for the development of a more gender-equitable division of labor. (shrink)

This article adds to the growing literature distinguishing second and third wave feminist theory. It opens by outlining theoretical differences between second wave and third wave definitions of femininity and the role and impact of femininity on gender relations of domination, whilst briefly acknowledging the complications of the relationship between third wave feminism and post-feminism. It then suggests that these diverging perspectives on embodied femininity result from fundamentally different second wave and third wave theories of power. In doing so, it (...) develops a third wave conceptual definition of femininity and a theoretical framework for power relations that are distinct from a second wave approach. It illustrates these differences by offering a close reading of textual representation of femininity in the film Pulp Fiction. (shrink)

In his most recent book, Philip Pettit presents and defends a “republican” political philosophy that stems from a tradition that includes Cicero, Machiavelli, James Harrington, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Madison. The book provides an interpretation of what is distinctive about republicanism—namely, Pettit claims, its notion of freedom as nondomination. He sketches the history of this notion, and he argues that it entails a unique justification of certain political arrangements and the virtues of citizenship that would make those arrangements possible. Of (...) historical and philosophical interest, he stresses, is the fundamental contrast between freedom as nondomination and slavery. Joseph Priestly, for instance, invoked this contrast in defending the cause of the American Revolution, and in 1769 declared, incredibly, that if the parliament of Great Britain continued to tax the American colonies, “the colonists will be reduced to a state of as complete servitude, as any people of which there is an account in history”. Those opposed to American independence, among them Jeremy Bentham, relied instead on a Hobbesian notion of freedom as noninterference, using it to argue that the colonists were no more interfered with by the British government than were citizens of Britain. Drawing out this contrast, Pettit aims to establish that a republican view of freedom better supports the institutions of a constitutional democracy than does liberalism. His account of the distinguishing characteristics and strengths of republicanism is, however, only partially successful. Neither his case that a republican notion of freedom provides for a more solid defense of democratic institutions and constitutional protections than is available within liberalism, nor his argument that republicanism can better address “private” injustices, is convincing. (shrink)

This book brings together the relevant interdisciplinary and method elements needed to form a conceptual framework that is both pragmatic and rigorous. By using the best, and often the latest, work in thanatology, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, physics, philosophy and ethics, it develops a framework for understanding both what death is - which requires a great deal of time spent developing definitions of the various types of identity-in-the-moment and identity-over-time - and the values involved in death. This pragmatic framework answers questions (...) about why death is a form of loss; why we experience the emotional reactions, feelings and desires that we do; which of these reactions, feelings and desires are justified and which are not; if we can survive death and how; whether our deaths can harm us; and why and how we should prepare for death. Thanks to the pragmatic framework employed, the answers to the various questions are more likely to be accurate and acceptable than those with less rigorous scholarly underpinnings or which deal with utopian worlds.. (shrink)

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. The author underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion (...) that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.--. (shrink)

There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this book, sports (...) fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are. Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are. (shrink)

Scientists and engineers lack the equivalent of an ethics committee to which their colleagues in the medical profession may turn when ethical dilemmas arise. In the US workers in aerospace industry have campaigned for a Technology Bill of Rights. In the UK there has been a vigorous movement around the concept of socially useful and environmentally desirable technology. The organisation Scientists for Social Responsibility has set up a panel of scientists who can advise younger colleagues on issues of ethical responsibility.

Individuals tend to judge bad side effects as more intentional than good side effects (the Knobe or side- effect effect). Here, we assessed how widespread these findings are by testing eleven adult cohorts of eight highly contrasted cultures on their attributions of intentional action as well as ratings of blame and praise. We found limited generalizability of the original side-effect effect, and even a reversal of the effect in two rural, traditional cultures (Samoa and Vanuatu) where participants were more likely (...) to judge the good side effect as intentional. Three follow-up experiments indicate that this reversal of the side-effect effect is not due to semantics and may be linked to the perception of the status of the protagonist. These results highlight the importance of factoring cultural context in our understanding of moral cognition. (shrink)

In _Always More Than One_, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects (...) this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation? (shrink)

It has been argued that, on Kantian grounds, pedophiles, rapists and murderers are morally obligated to take their own lives prior to committing a violent action that will end their moral agency. That is, to avoid destroying the agent's moral life by performing a morally suicidal action, the agent, while he still is a moral agent, should end his body's life. Although the cases of dementia and the morally reprehensible are vastly different, this Kantian interpretation might be useful in the (...) debate on the permissibility of suicide for those facing dementia's effects. If moral agents have a duty to act as moral agents, then those who will lose their moral identity as moral agents have an obligation to themselves to end their physical lives prior to losing their dignity as persons. (shrink)

This essay explores how the authors’ curatorial process has roots in _wonder_: how it is one of inquiry, beginning and ending with open questions. The authors describe how their “crip” curatorial methods can be used to refuse extractive practices that might result from a disengaged wonder and to generate exhibitions that hold both the viewers and the artists with the care necessary to move passive viewing into a reciprocal engagement that can lead to an activist turn. These curatorial methods acknowledge (...) and embrace medical professionals as potentially fellow disabled people and view them as current or potential allies. Through the participatory nature of the art in the exhibitions, the gallery becomes a space of encounter, one that creates support structures for people to build out from their individual, personal experiences and to become part of something shared across people, objects, memory, and experience. However, this shared space is not intended to collapse into ever fully knowing or understanding another person’s experience. Critically, it is also a shared engagement where access to someone else’s story, or body, or memories is not freely granted. Crip curation takes seriously the intentional omissions of both viewers and artists that upend not only what we get to know but how we get to know it and emphasizes that what we get to know and how we know it necessarily remains incomplete; viewers and artists alone retain full access to their own experiences. (shrink)

Erin M. Cline expresses skepticism of several dimensions of Chun Hin Tsoi’s attempt to establish a classical Confucian view of distributive justice. She admonishes us to distinguish the constructive derivation or development of such a concept from Confucian views from descriptive attribution of those views to the early thinkers themselves. Cline also dissuades us from constructivism that draws indiscriminately across a diversity of texts, since the Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi each offer their own distinct views on matters of justice, (...) which may variously align or conflict. She then further defends her particular interpretations of Analects passages. These rebuttals conclude by pointing to a shared sensitivity to moral luck in early Confucianism and contemporary liberalism that again draws together the sense of justice in Rawls and Confucius. In closing, Cline reminds us that the dimensions of justice she and Tsoi discuss are deeply interwoven into the rich fabric of values and concerns presented in the Analects, and encourages that we take account of the more robust content and context of these records of Confucius’ teachings. (shrink)

This issue gathers narratives written by health care providers from diverse religious backgrounds about the interplay between their faith and their clinical care. Three strong themes emerge. One is the value of the virtue of humility in providing effective, compassionate care. A second is the need to establish relationships grounded in trust and good communication especially when working in end of life care. The third theme is the importance of moral courage when working with patients who are facing difficult diagnoses (...) and decisions. Spirituality in the clinical encounter can allow for providers and patients to acknowledge the holy in each other. (shrink)

In visually cataloging the endearing and enigmatic ways in which the built environment takes shape, 'Best Practices' proposes a new way of thinking about neighbourhoods, housing developments, streetscapes, and storefronts, not so much as places defined by building codes, dimensions, or geographic features, but as assemblages of ad hoc interventions and incidental ephemera. Drawing on the history of architecture, media theory, cultural anthropology, and urban studies, 'Best Practices' pairs photographic documentation with extensive captions and citations to define a territory within (...) the margins between the sanctioned and unsanctioned, the regulated and unregulated, the tasteful and tacky, the novel and the nonsense. While not necessarily in opposition of those mechanisms, Best Practices asserts that interest, knowledge, and meaning are more often generated on the lines that divide such categories. This book advocates for a more thorough consideration of the unauthorised remodels, slap-dash handiwork, haphazard paint jobs, half-hearted do-it-yourself projects, cracked facades, contradictions, compromises, and coincidences. (shrink)

This paper clears a path toward an understanding of political action in-the-world. It does so by reconstructing Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Peter Wagner’s respective political social theories with a view to the hermeneutic-phenomenological problematic of the world. The analysis begins from the recognition of the human condition as always-already situated in-the-world: both within meaningful and shared world contexts, and within an overarching yet underdetermined world horizon. Two inherently interconnected notions of political action emerge from the reconstruction. The first, as (...) world-disclosing or world-interpreting doing, refers to the political critique that arises through the conflict of interpretations of the world, which reveals the world as a context of unity in a plurality. Connectedly, world-forming or world-making action relates to the introduction of novelty into the socio-cultural and historical field. From this view, political projects rearticulate the world following the interpretative critique of the instituted pattern of socio-cultural reality. As I argue, the openness of the underdetermined, overarching world-horizon provides the precondition for political projects that seek to critically reinterpret and rearticulate the socio-cultural institution of the world. Still, the approach to political action in-the-world offered in this paper remains open for development; the thematics of power and the temporality of doing are avenues for further consideration. (shrink)

Blaise Pascal contends that ritual is not simply an expression of religious faith; it is also the means by which religious faith is cultivated. While Pascal fails to offer a plausible account of how ritual can lead to faith, the classical Confucian philosopher Xunzi’s account of ritual – especially his account of how rituals shape a person’s character and how one comes to “acquire a taste” for the things that rituals achieve – is a helpful resource for extending and refining (...) Pascal’s account of how ritual works to transform not just our actions but our feelings, desires, and beliefs, as well. (shrink)

Eating animals acts as mirror and representation of patriarchal values. Meat eating is the re-inscription of male power at every meal. The patriarchal gaze sees not the fragmented flesh of dead animals but appetizing food. If our appetites re-inscribe patriarchy, our actions regarding eating animals will either reify or challenge this received culture. If meat is a symbol of male dominance then the presence of meat proclaims the disempowering of women.

Fusion genes formed by chromosomal rearrangements are common drivers of cancer. Recent innovations in the field of next‐generation sequencing (NGS) have seen a dynamic shift from traditional fusion detection approaches, such as visual characterization by fluorescence, to more precise multiplexed methods. There are many different NGS‐based approaches to fusion gene detection and deciding on the most appropriate method can be difficult. Beyond the experimental approach, consideration needs to be given to factors such as the ease of implementation, processing time, associated (...) costs, and the level of expertise required for data analysis. Here, the different NGS‐based methods for fusion gene detection, the basic principles underlying the techniques, and the benefits and limitations of each approach are reviewed. This article concludes with a discussion of how NGS will impact fusion gene detection in a clinical context and from where the next innovations are evolving. (shrink)

Recent moral philosophy has been characterized by some serious attempts to show that both Kantian and utilitarian moralities leave us with insufficient room to pursue our personal projects and relationships. These moralities have been charged with demanding a kind of impartiality that leaves us with too little space for developing ourselves and our friendships, family relations, communities, and nations in the ways best suited for us. Critics claim these theories implausibly maintain that if our personal relationships and affinities do not (...) further the ends of moral duty or maximum utility, they are of no value and hence we lack reason to devote ourselves to them. In what follows, I will assume that a conception of morality would indeed be implausible if it were to demand impartiality in the strong sense that it would be impermissible to favor our own projects and ambitions, to care especially about the welfare of certain persons rather than others, and sometimes to give preference to those we care most about, even when we could benefit strangers more. (shrink)

In Karl Rahner’s early writings we see that a search to understand the embodied experience of God motivated him to develop his understanding of the person as spirit-in-world. Along the way he developed a “tectonic logic” that would shape his entire theology. This early attempt to wrestle with the paradoxes of bodily graced experience offers a hermeneutical key for both understanding Rahner’s theology and thinking theologically about the body today.

The current study examined the normative boundaries of advertising by examining metadiscourse on native advertising. An analysis of 136 Adweek articles uncovered ways in which occupational actors talk about the boundary-spanning practice of native advertising. Metadiscourse represented a willingness and need to experiment within the “new frontier” of technological innovation and that external forces, such as the Federal Trade Commission, are better equipped to enforce the rules. However, norms were contested including those centered on transparency. Lastly, metadiscourse addressed the interprofessional (...) collaboration occurring among publishers, technology platforms, and content creators. The collaborative strategies employed appeared indicative of paradigm zoning, a jurisdictional means to substantiate (and relinquish) expertise in boundary-spanning practices such as native advertising. (shrink)

Sutland offers nine foundational mantras in her tri-fold approach to creating change, holistic wellness and fitness, and she will help you harness your body's mental, physical and spiritual energy in service to what you want.